Light Lifting (23 page)

ONCE, WHEN I WAS ABOUT ELEVEN, I punched Chris in the face as hard as I could and there was no joke behind it. The whole side of his head swelled out with fluid and started to turn colour, a kind of reddish purple. We were home for lunch and it was some stupid confrontation about nothing in the backyard. I have no idea what it was about. He fell over and rolled around on the ground.

“I can't see. I can't see,” he was crying. There was a little bit of blood in the corner of his eye.

My mother came out and shouted something about how this wasn't funny any more. She said that if we weren't careful somebody was really going to get hurt one of these times and then we'd be sorry. She put some ice on Chris's eye and she thought about keeping him home for the afternoon. But then the swelling was going down and she didn't want him to miss class, so she sent him back to school.

That was a mistake. Fifteen minutes after we returned to school, the principal called us both down to his office. We had never been in this situation before.

“How did this happen?” the principal asked me and he kind of waved at my brother's messed-up face. “Who hurt you, Christopher?”

“I did it,” I said.

I did not cry, but it was almost there. It almost came through. All the possible consequences of the truth ran through my head. I thought about my permanent record and about what would happen if I was suspended or expelled.

“I hit him,” I said. “It was an accident.”

“See?” Chris said. “Like I told you, he's the one who did it.”

“And you're both sure about this?” the principal asked again. The facts weren't working for him. He crouched down in front of me and pointed at Chris's face again.

“This doesn't seem like something you would do, Michael. Look at him. Are you sure there's no one else involved? You're not covering for somebody else? If something happened in the yard, you both need to tell me. Just give me the name. Tell me his name. You don't need to be afraid. You don't have to cover for a bully. I will not have violence in this school.”

“No,” I said again. “It was just me. Just us. I punched him at home in the backyard. I'm sorry it happened.”

It took maybe one more second, but after that you could actually see the relief flowing into the principal's face. All the red drained out of his cheeks and he took a big breath.

“Okay then, okay,” he said and he stood up and almost smiled. It was obvious that we had spared him from some complicated process involving letters and legal forms. I guess there must have been some kind of grade-school handbook that said violence was absolutely forbidden, but knocking out your sibling was still allowed. He looked at us and shook his head back and forth. I think he even laughed a bit.

“Lay off each other,” he said. “Okay? I know how it is. I've got a brother. Everybody wants to kill their brother once in a while. Just take it easy.”

Then he signed our little slips of paper and told us to go back to class and that was it. Not even a call home.

I'm pretty sure that Reggie was an only child, or that at least he didn't live with the rest of his family anymore. It was just him and his Mom in the house across the street and she must have worked afternoons or maybe midnights because we never saw her. We'd catch a glimpse of her coming and going maybe, but I never really met her until much later on. Reggie had his own key to let himself in and out and he took a lunch to school. He could do whatever he wanted.

Slowly, over a couple of weeks or months, Reggie wormed his way deeper and deeper into our lives. He'd sit on his porch in the morning and wait for us to come out and then we'd all leave for school together. And at recess, he'd find one of us and hang near by, never saying anything, just staying close. And he was always there for hockey after school. He spoke so well and he was so crazy polite all the time, that after a while, my mother was so impressed she invited him over for dinner. She asked what his favourite food was and he said cabbage rolls. He could have had anything and Reggie chose cabbage rolls. It wasn't something we normally ate, but my mother found a recipe and did her best with it. After about a month, our schedule was set: every Tuesday night we had him over for cabbage rolls.

“If your mother says it's okay, Reggie, you can come over and have dinner with us tonight if you'd like,” my mother would say. And then she'd wait for it.

“Well, that depends,” Reggie would say, grinning because he fell so easily into this kind of back and forth with adults.

“What will you be making tonight?”

“I was thinking about cabbage rolls. How does that sound?”

“Wonderful,” he said. “That's great. Cabbage rolls are my favourite meal.”

It was the cabbage rolls that turned everything around. I hated them: the sour smell, the squished rice, the slimy green shell. Once, during one of those dinners, I leaned over to Matt and whispered, “I can't eat this shit anymore.”

I pointed my fork at Reggie on the other side of the table, but I didn't think it was obvious.

“He's starving me right out of my own house.”

Matthew smirked a bit. But when we looked up, it was over. My mother had her teeth gritted together hard and she was shaking her head back and forth.

“Go,” she said. Kind of quietly at first, then louder.

“Get out of here, right now. The two of you. Get out of my sight.”

She threw her fork down onto the plate and stood up, pointing us out of the kitchen.

We had to wiggle past Reggie's chair to get out from the table and then we were face to face to face with her.

“Sometimes I wonder where you come from,” my mother said, talking directly to me. “Sometimes I think I've wasted all my time on you.”

She was so angry or so disgusted I thought she was going to lose it right there in the kitchen in front of him. I thought maybe she was going to cry or hit us like she sometimes did when she was so frustrated she didn't know what else to do. My father, who'd been quiet throughout the whole thing stood up beside her and as we went by, he sort of shoved us along the way upstairs. When he looked at me, it felt like his eyes were pushing mine into the back of my skull.

“Yeah, you're starving, aren't you,” he whispered and he rubbed his forehead with his fingertips and then kind of pinched the bridge of his nose. He was trying hard to keep it under control. “You're starving. Right.”

After that it was obvious that nobody could touch Reggie while he was in our house. My parents made sure we left him alone. Outside though, things were getting worse. At school, Reggie didn't have anybody so he used to cling to us as if we were his best friends. It was okay for me because I was so much older, and I could just ignore it, but it was killing James. Other kids started to tease him about Reggie, asking if Reggie was James's new girlfriend and singing stupid rhymes about Reggie and James sitting in a tree. It got to be too much – it seemed that nothing worse could happen to a kid that age – and one day James turned on him.

“Listen,” he said as we were all walking to school. “I don't want you hanging around with me anymore. You have to get some other friends.”

“I don't want to,” said Reggie. “I don't like them. I like you guys and I like your mom and I like your dad. And that is everybody who I like. That's it. Nobody else.”

“You don't get it,” James said slowly. “Leave me alone. Do you understand? Stay away from me.”

“I'm not going to leave you alone. Even though you say so, I don't have to,” Reggie said. “You can't make me. I'm going to stay, and if you try to make me leave then I'll tell on you. I'll tell your mother and your father.”

We were all caught off guard, but since James was the one talking, he just went nuts.

“You will so leave me alone, you little shit, you little fucking retard,” he said.

“Leave me alone. Leave all of us alone. Don't you get it? None of us like you. Don't you get that yet? Leave us alone.”

“No,” said Reggie. “No.”

It was just short and simple like that and you could tell he wasn't even angry. It all just bounced right off him. Like he heard it, thought about it, and decided not to take it. He turned and sort of skipped off along the way to school and after a couple steps he turned back and looked right at James. He kind of sang at him in a teasing voice, “No-no-no, No-no-no.”

That cracked it wide open. James took off after Reggie and he tackled him in the front yard of this house and he started hitting him hard in the stomach and in the face. They were rolling around and then James was on top, kneeling over him, pinning Reggie's arms with his knees and he was belting him with his closed fists. Then he got up and started kicking Reggie in the arms and then up around his neck and his ears and then right square between the legs as hard as he could.

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Leave me alone,” James said. And even though Reggie was getting pounded, he still kept talking back, stuttering through it.

“It doesn't hurt, doesn't hurt.” he said. “No . . . no . . . no. Doesn't hurt.”

Some people think that when kids fight it's just cute or funny, but that's only because they've never really seen it. They've never seen how, if the timing is right, it's like an electric current is being fired right through the body of a little boy, like he's been electrocuted and this jolt is ripping through every bit of him. James was like that with Reggie and it was not cute or funny. I think it was the only time, the only time that any of us, any of my brothers, ever got in one of those bloody, drag down, if-I-had-a-knife-I'd-stab-you-in-the-eye kind of fights with someone who wasn't one of us. We did it to each other every once in awhile, but this was the only time we went after somebody separate, somebody we didn't have to come back to in the end.

By the time Matthew and Chris and I ripped them off each other they were both a mess. It had poured rain the night before and it was still early in the morning so the ground was all sloppy and greasy. James was covered. His pants were wrecked, all green and brown around the knees from when he had been kneeling over him and his shirt was stretched out of shape, and ripped a little bit around the neck. There was this thick wet mud all over his face and his hands.

Reggie was worse. Because he was lying on his back, all the blood from his nose was smeared out across his face. It ran back towards his ears and up into his hair and down into his mouth in these long, long spidery thin lines. It was like his face was a window and someone had thrown a rock right through the middle of it. When Matthew first looked at him, he said, “Holy Fuck, we have to take him to the hospital right away.”

Then he turned on James.

“Look what you did to this little kid,'” he said. “We have to go to the hospital now. We're going to get killed for this. All of us, you know, not just you. We're all dead for this one.”

He was wrong. In the end, it turned out that we weren't all dead because of this. We weren't ever even going to hear about it again. We didn't have to call an ambulance and we didn't have to go to the hospital and we didn't have to fill out a report because, in the end, it turned out that Reggie was fine or he at least seemed fine or he pretended to be fine. When we got James off him, he jumped right up and he said, again, “No, no, no. We're all right, don't worry.”

He didn't cry once and even though, as I was watching it happen, it looked like he was really getting the snot beat out of him, now, I thought that maybe Reggie had been telling the truth all along and that it really didn't hurt, didn't hurt. It was like all that pounding hadn't got anywhere near the centre of him.

He got up, walked out into the street and crouched down near a big murky brown puddle that had formed the night before when one of the sewer grates backed up. Then he cupped his two hands and he dipped them deep into that solid brown, grit-filled water as if it was a completely normal thing to do, as if this was a pure white sink in a pure white bathroom. He pushed his face into it, rubbed his palms up and down and then used his fingertips to work the dirt out from around his eyes and the blood from under his nostrils and down by his mouth. He splashed some into his hair and tried to smooth it down back to normal.

James was the one who turned scared now. He sat there, on the soaking wet ground, dazed and crying these soft little really sad cries, almost whimpering. Reggie called him to come over to the puddle and James got up and went straight over.

“I'm sorry, Reggie, I'm so sorry,” he said, all runny-nosed and crying and dirty. “Please don't tell anyone, okay. I'm so sorry, please don't tell anybody.”

“Don't worry about it,” Reggie said. He was flat and calm now. Every second he was coming back closer and closer to his normal self. His face was almost okay, a little puffy maybe but getting there.

“I won't tell anybody,” he said. “It's okay. I know you didn't mean it. But we have to get cleaned up right now. You and I have to get cleaned up or everyone will ask what happened.”

A second later James was doing the same thing. He was in there, in the puddle, scrubbing his face and his arms, trying to get the dirt out from under his fingernails.

Reggie said, “Face and hands. You just got to get your face and hands looking all right. For the rest you can just say you wiped out somewhere. No big deal. Come on now. Let's see what you look like now. Let me get a good look at you.”

James stopped washing and he turned toward Reggie. And Reggie put his two hands on either side of James' face. And then he untucked his own collared shirt and started to dry off James' face with it, wiping around in soft circles.

“There you go,” he said, “All better. Good as new. You look fine to me.”

The two of them walked over to a car and looked at their reflections in one of the side mirrors. Then he turned to us.